Nodes in a wireless network such as a sensor network or a control network often have energy constraints. These nodes may harvest energy from their environment or require a long service life from a battery. Nodes that communicate using radio transmissions often include transceivers for transmitting and receiving data. When communicating using radio transmissions, nodes may use a variety of modulation and coding schemes, with more complex schemes generally offering advantages of improved robustness and throughput. More complex modulation schemes generally require more power for a node to demodulate and decode transmissions. In addition, nodes often work cooperatively to transmit data across a network and may be required to retransmit data that does not reach a target node. Accordingly, nodes must often remain powered-on in order to verify that a transmission has reached its target. Most transceivers operating in an idle state, however, have a power consumption almost equal to the power consumed in a receive state. Accordingly, when determining a communication technique for energy constrained nodes in a network, employing techniques to increase robustness often lead to a decrease in energy efficiency.